The Help, Wisdom & Annoyances of Grandmothers

Pardon the gratuitous book cover from Amazon. It’s there to break up the text, provide a revenue-generating link and connect me to the topic of mother-in-laws. (It is a very entertaining book on the subject, by the way.)

My children have just one grandparent. The others are gone, but are never very far away. We live a great distance from my mother, but she has come to Germany for the births of each child and was a great help to all of us when she was here.

This post, though, is about my mother-in-law who died in January. She had time to hear of the birth and talk it over with friends and family, but had to go without ever having met my little girl, her fourth grandchild. My mother-in-law, Nadia was a difficult woman. I am not saying that in the all mother-in-laws are difficult theme. It was a universally recognised opinion of her character. Still, we understood each other as well as two people who don’t speak each other’s language can understand each other. And, while I didn’t always like her, I did love her. I am positive she would say the same of me.

I often wonder, what it would have been like to have her around the house to “help” with the babies. When I am imagining it, I think about how I would have handled the disputes and annoyances my friends have had with their mothers and mothers-in-law when a new baby joins the family.

First of all, I know the feeling of bringing a baby home from the hospital and just wanting to get on with being a mother. After all, even if we’ve never taken care of babies before, we’ve all watched and read and made decisions about how to do it. It can be more than a little annoying to have someone around who is constantly saying, “well, in my day every baby drank formula and was put to sleep on its stomach and they didn’t come to any harm,” etc.

Writing that made me remember a grandmother I met at the gym once. She was using the Step Master beside mine and told me about her son and three grandchildren who lived near by.

“You must be a big help to your daughter-in-law,” I said. “She must feel lucky to have you around.”

“To be honest,” the grandmother said, “I kept my distance after the third one was born. I figured after three she’s know what she was doing.”

“Stupid cow,” I thought. “Abdoning her poor daughter-in-law with a new baby and two other kids.”

I am a lot more understanding now. I realised that to many new grandmothers “helping” is viewed as more instructional rather than practical. They think their role is to teach you how to be a mother, rather than to just lend a hand. And this fundamental misunderstanding of roles seems to be at the heart of much conflict between new grandmother and new mother, whether mother and daughter or mother-in-law and daughter-in-law.

How do you handle this? Well, you treat grandma with respect and tell her you know you have a lot to learn and make a suggestion about the kind of help you really want. I am not especially diplomatic and my Bulgarian is too limited for tact, so I would have said to my mother-in-law something like, “I know it takes me a long time to change a diaper. Will you cook dinner while I practice? The chicken is in the fridge and the potatoes are in the cupboard next to the sink.”

And then, there’s the fact that two women will always have different opinions on everything. My mother doesn’t smoke and my mother-in-law didn’t, but even if they did, my husband and I have no problem telling our favourite people to go out on the balcony if they want to light up. This makes us only slightly less popular with our European friends who smoke, but most people are understanding when it comes to protecting the health of children.

Still, I think the nature of addictions makes is better to make “smoke outside” the issue rather than, “no smoking at all,” but none of us can dictate what should happen in other people’s houses. When other people we are visiting smoke, we just take our kids into another room or outside because it’s the best we can do and maintain good relations. For some women, visiting any house where smoking is permitted with a baby wouldn’t even be considered. And maybe, that is done in the best interests of the child. As long as it doesn’t become an issue that robs the child of an important relationship.
I love my grandmother ferociously. She smoked like a chimney. It’s a disgusting habit. Still, I hope my own grandchildren love me as much as I love her. Even though I am not perfect.